The Spirit of Goodyear has a distinctive yellow stripe under the logo.(Image Source: Wikipedia.org )

Goodyear slowly pieces together its airship future

By Akron Beacon Journal

Published: Saturday, March 30, 2013, 12:01 a.m.

SUFFIELD TOWNSHIP, Ohio — It resembled a
giant erector set, and the men working on it looked as happy as kids
with a new toy at Christmas.

But this was serious business, as the men at
Goodyear's Wingfoot Lake hangar were literally building Goodyear's
airship future: the first of three larger, faster airships that will
replace the company's iconic blimp fleet.

“We are just at the dawn” of a new airship
era, Nancy Ray, Goodyear's director of global airship operations, said
recently at the hangar.

The partnership between Goodyear and the
German ZLT Zeppelin is a return to the roots of Goodyear's airship
program. ZLT Zeppelin, which dates to 1995, is a reconstituted version
of the German Zeppelin company that Goodyear worked with decades ago to
bring rigid airship technology to America.

That history has been hidden in plain sight
for decades — the GZ in the current fleet of GZ-20A blimps stands for
“Goodyear Zeppelin.”

Goodyear has built and operated more than
300 lighter-than-air vehicles since 1917, including two large rigid
airships, the USS Macon and the USS Akron, built for the Navy in the
1930s.

Saturday, March 30, 2013

By Frank Morring, Jr. morring@aviationweek.com

Source: AWIN First

Credit: Rick Sternbach/Keck Institute for Space StudiesMarch 28, 2013

NASA’s fiscal 2014 budget request will include $100 million for a new
mission to find a small asteroid, capture it with a robotic spacecraft
and bring it into range of human explorers somewhere in the vicinity of
the Moon.

Suggested last year by the Keck Institute for Space
Studies at the California Institute of Technology, the idea has
attracted favor at NASA and the White House Office of Science and
Technology Policy. President Obama’s goal of sending astronauts to a
near-Earth asteroid by 2025 can’t be done with foreseeable civil-space
spending, the thinking goes. But by moving an asteroid to cislunar space
— a high lunar orbit or the second Earth-Moon Lagrangian Point (EML2),
above the Moon’s far side — it is conceivable that technically the
deadline could be met.

An artist's rendering of the Mars One colony and astronauts on the Red Planet. (Bryan Versteeg/Mars One)

By BEN WALDRON

Mar. 28, 2013

A Dutch start-up named Mars One is hoping to send a select group of
brave astronauts on a one-way trip to the Red Planet in the year 2023
with the aim of establishing a permanent human colony.

If all proceeds as planned, Mars One would launch four astronauts on the
interplanetary voyage in 2022, landing the team on the surface of Mars
in 2023, after which they would begin constructing the colony. Every
two years, a team of four additional astronauts would arrive to
reinforce the existing colony.

Founded in 2010 by 36-year-old engineer Bas Lansdorp, Mars One says it
has developed a road map and financing plan for the project, and that
the mission is perfectly feasible. "Mars One has developed a precise,
realistic plan based entirely upon existing technologies," the website says.
"It is both economically and logically feasible, in motion through the
integration of existing suppliers and experts in space exploration."

Friday, March 29, 2013

New Evidence Ancient Asteroid Caused Global Firestorm On Earth

Mar. 27, 2013 — A new look
at conditions after a Manhattan-sized asteroid slammed into a region of
Mexico in the dinosaur days indicates the event could have triggered a
global firestorm that would have burned every twig, bush and tree on
Earth and led to the extinction of 80 percent of all Earth's species,
says a new University of Colorado Boulder study.

A new
CU-Boulder study shows that an asteroid believed to have smacked Earth
some 66 million years ago likely caused a global firestorm that led to
extensive plant and animal extinctions. (Credit: Illustration courtesy
NASA/JPL)

Led by Douglas Robertson of the Cooperative Institute for Research in
Environmental Sciences, or CIRES, the team used models that show the
collision would have vaporized huge amounts of rock that were then blown
high above Earth's atmosphere. The re-entering ejected material would
have heated the upper atmosphere enough to glow red for several hours at
roughly 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit -- about the temperature of an oven
broiler element -- killing every living thing not sheltered underground
or underwater.

Green Meteorite May Be from Mercury, a First

This green meteorite that landed in Morocco in 2012 could be from Mercury.CREDIT: Stefan Ralew/sr-meteorites.de

Scientists may have discovered the first meteorite from Mercury.

The green rock found in Morocco last year may be the first known
visitor from the solar system's innermost planet, according to meteorite
scientist Anthony Irving, who unveiled the new findings this month at
the 44th annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands,
Texas. The study suggests that a space rock called NWA 7325 came from
Mercury, and not an asteroid or Mars.

NWA 7325 is actually a group of 35 meteorite samples discovered in 2012
in Morocco. They are ancient, with Irving and his team dating the rocks
to an age of about 4.56 billion years.

Major companies such as Dow Corning
and Union Carbide can trace their histories to discoveries at the Mellon
Institute for Industrial Research in the Oakland Civic Center of Pittsburgh.

Brothers Andrew W. and Richard B.
Mellon created the center in March 1913, at a time when most companies
didn't have their own research labs. The investors envisioned a center
where businesses could pay scientists to work on new ideas.

Products ranging from antifreeze and
synthetic rubber to casings that allow hot dogs to be mass produced were
developed early in the institute's history, and the bouncy toy Silly
Putty was an accidental discovery.

Later, corporations built their own centers such as Bell Laboratories in
New Jersey and Dupont Central Research in Delaware, which had their
heydays in the 1960s and 1970s, he said. Mellon Institute merged with
Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1967 to form Carnegie Mellon
University.

The Institute's eight-story, neo-classical building, built at a cost of $10 million, opened in May of 1937, two and one-half years before the 1939 October 24 dedication of the three-floor, art-deco building of Pittsburgh's original
Buhl Planetarium and Institute of Popular Science, built at a cost of $1.07 million.

March 27, 2013: Over the years, the spacefaring
nations of Earth have sent dozens of probes and rovers to explore Mars.
Today there are three active satellites circling the red planet while
two rovers, Opportunity and Curiosity, wheel across the red sands
below. Mars is dry, barren, and apparently lifeless.

Soon, those assets could find themselves exploring a very different kind of world.
"There is a small but non-negligible chance that Comet 2013 A1
will strike Mars next year in October of 2014," says Don Yeomans of
NASA's Near-Earth Object Program at JPL. "Current solutions put the
odds of impact at 1 in 2000."

In a new ScienceCast video, experts discuss what might happen if Comet 2013 A1 hits Mars.

"We are extremely proud to be the home of the space shuttle
Enterprise," Susan Marenoff-Zausner, president of the Intrepid, said in a
statement. "It is an honor to receive this distinction from the
National Park Service."

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) — the arbiter of planetary
and satellite nomenclature since its inception in 1919 — recently
approved a proposal from the MESSENGER Science Team to assign names to
nine impact craters on Mercury. In keeping with the established naming
theme for craters on Mercury, all of the newly designated features are
named after famous deceased artists, musicians, or authors or other
contributors to the humanities.

The newly named craters include for the following authors and poets:

L'Engle, for Madeleine L'Engle (1918-2007), an American writer best known for young-adult fiction, particularly the award-winning A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels: A Wind in the Door, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Many Waters, and An Acceptable Time. Her works reflect both her Christian faith and her strong interest in modern science.

Alver, for Betti Alver (1906-1989), an Estonian writer
who rose to prominence in the 1930s, toward the end of Estonian
independence and on the eve of World War II. She published her first
novel, Mistress in the Wind, in 1927. She also wrote several short stories, poetry, and translations.

Donelaitis, for Kristijonas Donelaitis (1714-1780), a
Lutheran pastor who was considered one of the greatest Lithuanian poets.
He is best known for The Seasons, considered the first classic
Lithuanian poem. It depicts the everyday life of Lithuanian peasants.
His other works include six fables and a tale in verse.

Flaiano, for Ennio Flaiano (1910-1972), an Italian
screenwriter, playwright, novelist, journalist, and drama critic
especially noted for his social satires. He became a leading figure of
the Italian motion-picture industry after World War II, collaborating
with writer Tullio Pinelli on the early films of writer and director
Federico Fellini.

Lovecraft, for Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937),
an American author of horror, fantasy, and science fiction regarded as
one of the most influential horror writers of the 20th Century. He
popularized "cosmic horror," the notion that some concepts, entities, or
experiences are barely comprehensible to human minds, and those who
delve into such topics risk their sanity.

Petofi, for Sandor Petofi (1823-1849), a Hungarian poet and liberal revolutionary. He wrote the Nemzeti dal
(National Poem), which is said to have inspired the Hungarian
Revolution of 1848 that grew into a war for independence from the
Austrian Empire.

A miniature version of Harry Potter's invisibility cloak now exists,
though it works only in microwave light, and not visible light, so far.

Still, it's a nifty trick, and the physicists who've created the new cloak say it's a step closer to realizing the kind of invisibility cloak that could hide a person in broad daylight.

The invention is made of a new kind of material called a metascreen,
created from strips of copper tape attached to a flexible polycarbonate
film. The copper strips are only 66 micrometers (66 millionths of a
meter) thick, while the polycarbonate film is 100 micrometers thick, and
the two are combined in a diagonal fishnet pattern.

Scientists have now
discovered that studying meteorites from the giant asteroid Vesta helps
them understand the event known as the "lunar cataclysm," when a
repositioning of the gas giant planets destabilized a portion of the
asteroid belt and triggered a solar-system-wide bombardment. Image
credit: NASA/GSFC/ASU/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

PASADENA, Calif. - NASA and international researchers have discovered
that Earth's moon has more in common than previously thought with large
asteroids roaming our solar system.

Scientists from NASA's Lunar Science Institute (NLSI) in Moffett Field,
Calif., discovered that the same population of high-speed projectiles
that impacted our lunar neighbor four billion years ago, also hit the
giant asteroid Vesta and perhaps other large asteroids.

The research unveils an unexpected link between Vesta and the moon, and
provides new means for studying the early bombardment history of
terrestrial planets. The findings are published in the March issue of
Nature Geoscience.

Mars Curiosity rover gets back to sending snapshots

NASA / JPL-Caltech / Marco Di Lorenzo / Ken Kremer

The
Curiosity rover's instrument-laden robotic arm is front and center in
this mosaic view captured by the Mars rover's NavCam system and
assembled by Marco Di Lorenzo and Ken Kremer. The colorized
black-and-white imagery was captured on March 23. Click on the image to
see the full panorama.

By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News

After a week of down time due to a
computer glitch, NASA's Mars Curiosity rover is once again sending back
pictures of its rocky Red Planet locale at Yellowknife Bay. In this
fresh panorama, the rover looks as if it's sticking its drill-equipped
robotic arm right in your face.

"That drill is hungry, looking for
something tasty to eat, and 'you' (loaded with water and organics) are
it," jokes scientist-writer Ken Kremer, who collaborated with Italian colleague Marco Di Lorenzo to assemble the panorama.

Curiosity's percussive drill played a key role in the science team's
most recently reported breakthrough: the finding that powder drilled out
of a Martian rock contained the chemical traces of a life-friendly environment
that existed on Mars billions of years ago. The team's chemical
analysis of the powder indicated that the minerals were probably formed
in the presence of drinkable water.

Sunday, March 24, 2013

NASA Internal Memo: Guidance for Education and Public Outreach Activities Under Sequestration

Posted Friday, March 22, 2013

Effective immediately, all education and public outreach activities
should be suspended, pending further review. In terms of scope, this
includes all public engagement and outreach events, programs,
activities, and products developed and implemented by Headquarters,
Mission Directorates, and Centers across the Agency, including all
education and public outreach efforts conducted by programs and
projects.

The scope encompasses, but is not limited to:

- Programs, events, and workshops.
- Permanent and traveling exhibits, signage, and other materials.
- Speeches, presentations, and appearances, with the exception of
technical presentations by researchers at scientific and technical
symposia.
- Video and multimedia products in development (and renewal of existing products).
- Web and social media sites in development (excludes operational sites).
- External and internal publications, with the exception of Scientific and Technical Information as defined by NPD 2200.1B.
- Any other activity whose goal is to reach out to external and
internal stakeholders and the public concerning NASA, its programs, and
activities.

Buzz Aldrin Refutes Space Sale, Is Keeping Moon Memorabilia

This Apollo 11 lunar ascent procedure sheet is being sold by
Bonhams New York City on March 25, 2013, but not on astronaut Buzz
Aldrin's behalf. CREDIT: Bonhams

A New York auction house is set to sell more than 300
space artifacts on Monday (March 25), including original documents that
were flown to the moon and used to carry out the first manned lunar
landing.

But contrary to recent headlines prompted by Bonhams' upcoming "Space History Sale," the Apollo 11 moonwalker,whose lunar-traveled checklists and flight plans are being offered, is not the one doing the selling.

"I am not offering any items for sale from my current collection of
Apollo 11 articles in the Bonhams auction," astronaut Buzz Aldrin said
in statement provided to collectSPACE.com.
"The Apollo 11 items being auctioned on Monday are being resold from
auctions that took place in 2007 or earlier at the instigation of my
ex-wife and her daughter who acted as my attorney and business manager."

Buzz Aldrin,
who with the late Neil Armstrong walked on the moon's Sea of Tranquility
in 1969, was divorced from his wife of 24 years, Lois Driggs Cannon
Aldrin, in December. The 83-year-old astronaut cited "irreconcilable
differences" as to the reason for the separation.

The artifacts now being resold include flight plan pages, a checklist
card and the procedure sheets that were used by Aldrin and Armstrong to
lift off from the moon's surface.